The milk of human kindness

Meeja-bashing (part 94)Paul McCartney's strange and estranged ex-wife Heather Mills is getting lots of flak from the British press of late. To give Mills her due, she's nowhere near as bonkers as she's made out to be by her enemies in the meeja who gleefully pounce on her every word, twisting them to suit their needs.

Take her recent pronouncements on milk and the imbibing thereof, for example. She was roundly ridiculed for reportedly suggesting that we should all drink rat's milk instead of cowjuice in order to save the planet. Oh, how they must have laughed as they penned their "mad cow" headlines.

But if any of them bothered to read what she said, they'd realise she wasn't advocating drinking grande rattés at all. Rather, she was making the point that milking animals of any description - be they cows, rats, lesser-crested Mongolian cave-badgers or, as in her own case, Beatles - is environmentally catastrophic.

She was launching a campaign by advocacy group Viva, which argues that veganism can halt rising global temperatures, which they put down to the phenomenal amounts of methane sent into the atmosphere by the planet's 1.2 billion domesticated bovines, which produce far more greenhouse gases via their exhaust pipes than all the world's cars and trucks and planes combined.

Misrepresented or not, Mills may have inadvertently stumbled upon something. Part of the reason cows are so flatulent is the fact they need four stomachs to process their cellulose-heavy diet. Rats, on the other hand, have only the one. Therefore, they produce far less gas per pint of milk produced than cows do. So, harnessing the power of the rat may well help save the planet.

I have my doubts though. Think of the logistics. Can you imagine how fiddly herding a flurry of lowing, heavy-uddered rodents into a mini-milking parlour would be? Would you use chihuahuas instead of border collies? And where would you get all the little wooden stools?

Any sympathy I had for Mills evaporated when I learned that she'd gone and shot herself in the foot by turning up at the Viva launch in a hulking great SUV. Worse still, she left the engine running as she conducted interviews.

"As individuals, and hopefully within your family, you can reduce global warming rather than rely on governments who talk and talk but do very little about it," pontificated the preachy vegan hypocrite from the expansively-leathered interior of her fume-belching SUV.

All of which left me a bit confused. What exactly is she trying to say? Is it that, if we want to save the planet, we must kill all the cows, skin them, tan their hides and use the leather to cover the seats in our fleets of SUVs?

That can't be right, can it?